A modern cellular telephone is equipped with significant functionality that extends well beyond telephonic communication. For example, an IPHONE brand cellular telephone (cell phone) includes connectivity to the Internet, and the capability to record and store digital images. Advantage is taken of the multiple functions, in unique ways, to enhance the desirability of cell phone use. For example, a service is provided whereby a user can utilize a cell phone to record the image of an object of interest to the user, and send the digital image, for example, via the Internet, to a remote service that proceeds to identify the object, and return information regarding the object to the user. A problem associated with such a service is that varying conditions that may exist at the time the digital image was taken can interfere with an accurate performance of an object recognition task. For example, varying illumination conditions existing at the time an image is recorded, can result in shadows cast across an object depicted in the image. Such shadows can prevent a computer system from performing an accurate analysis of object features depicted in the image, and thus, cause a failure to properly identify the object.
Other services available today involve, for example, a scanning of paper documents such as credit card receipts and other invoices received for expenses incurred, and either the transmission of the scanned documents to a central service that implements an optical character recognition algorithm, or downloading to a laptop or desk top computer by the user, for optical character recognition, to obtain a machine readable and editable version of the information of the original document, and to record and process that information from the scanned documents. These services also encounter problems such as the inconvenience of traveling with a scanning device, and inaccuracies due to folds, creases or other distortions of the original, scanned paper documents.